Three more US soldiers were shot and killed on Saturday by an Afghan trainee at a base in Helmand province, raising to six the number of American troops killed by their Afghan partners in just 24 hours.

In the first attack, US troops were lured to their deaths by an Afghan police commander who invited them to dinner Thursday night. The Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks and said the gunmen had defected to the insurgency.

We need to be clear here: uniformed Afghan soldiers are shooting back at our own soldiers and they are targeting the security apparatus of the puppet government in Kabul -- that is, targeting the military and the police, and killing many civilians in the process. The United States is wasting its sons and daughters to enforce peace on a region on the brink of a civil war. And for what, exactly?

Of course, our military leaders and the politicians in Washington, D.C. will probably conclude that in order to prevent these incidents in the future, our military will just have to screen Afghan trainees just a little bit more carefully to make sure they are not infiltrators, as opposed to concluding that these incidents will not stop, and are the logical and inevitable result of 11 years of America's brutal war in Afghanistan. What do we expect from Afghans after a decade of enduring bombings, rapes, and mass murders under U.S. occupation? When would we recognize the rights of foreigners to resist imperialism, to resist occupation, to resist the various crimes against humanity perpetuated against the most powerless of their people in our name?

I hadn't heard about uniformed Afghan soldiers shooting Americans. Eesh. Unfortunately, this will probably become an excuse to stay longer -- so we can get the situation really under control, of course.

The war is pretty much Afghan patriots attempting to expel an occupying power, if you go with the Geneva Conventions and our own Military Commissions Act of 2006's definitions--that is, these are lawful enemy combatants. Yet we are treating them as anything but and committing war crimes in the process.